2001 in 2001: A Space Odyssey

2001
in 200l:

Being
and Nothingness Revisited

If biologists, poets and
historians are right, consciousness and cosmos have no beginning and no
end.Ontogeny is said to recapitulate
phylogeny: in the division of a cell we see the origins and progress of a
species. In 1969, I took in three things on TV: an escalating war in Southeast
Asia, an Apollo moonwalk, and Kubrick’s 200l:
A Space Odyssey. I was twelve; in social studies I tried to fathom a phrase
like does the end justify the means?
while other seventh graders were kissing and petting and losing their minds to
various cultural Newspeaks. To me the universe was still a lright-handed pitcher
for the World Series St. Louis Cardinals (Bob Gibson), Black Like Me, anda
greatly-abridged The Second Sex. We hadn’t paid attention to the riots in
Watts; Janis Joplin was still alive; we weren’t yet reading Hegel, but I did
hear Strauss’ Thus Spoke Zarathustra,
and I was moved.

The odyssey makes silence
verbal: the dawn of Man was Cain’s jawbone homicide: with it came curiosity. In
the film, we peer from behind the Sirens’ rocks, and find that sapience birthed
genius and evil, and later art, caretaker love, the ability to listen gracefully.
A Heuristic-Algorithmic microprocessor, surrogate mom to IBM and Microsoft,
lip-reads, sings lullabies, forgets things, and kills to cover when he errs.
Listless, drifting cosmonauts in praying mantis spacesuits, women ligatured in
suspended animation, all dream-producing monsters. Muffled sound of breathing,
Poe’s telltale heart, our own shallow gasps. From a uterine ship, untethered,
we dangle and drift umbilically. The pulsing, binary birth of a star, a black
milk galaxy, a sea of amniotic fluid. We strive to hear ourselves breathe,
above the fray of politics and nightmare shopping. This inspiration is our
gift; Kubrick’s was to flood its feeling onto the wide, deep screen.

The
question was and is: what have we learned through cloning, palm pilots, and the
Internet? 1984 whizzed by with no Big Brother to speak of. Rockets still
scuttle over Serbia. On a day when
Palestinians are shot beside the Temple Mount, Liberia’s streets are restive, a
space shuttle lifts from Kazakhstan, hermaphrodite polar bears are poisoned
with PCPs, and two nearly-indistinguishable national cartoon Presidential
candidates duke it out, we live for the magnetic pull towards the unknown,
unfelt, unsaid, unseen.It twitches our
privates; it masters our conviction to make a better world. In space, Panam,
Hilton, the BBC should be everlasting: Baltic underwater research is prophetic
of our own Kursk tragedy. What Kubrick sang was timeless: the sneer of
Ramepithecus, magenta go-go seats, Op-Art, antigravity pens, the psychotropic
birth canal of parallaxed, desert wastelands--images spawning a map of the
unconscious.

The
last act in the poor play of the life of a human being, for Shakespeare, was
mere oblivion: sans eyes, sans teeth, sans taste, sans
everything. Not so for us. My daughter will be twelve next month when we
trip to the Providence IMAX Theater to see this film. She’s on the Triplett
Student Council; she’s counseled me to vote for Nader’s Greens.I know that the shock of recognition she’ll
receive, when the bone goes up and the mission ship to Jupiter floats forever
on is reason enough to believe in regress and progress in flux, in seeing the
life of a girl as the whorl of a species carrying on. For her, for kids of the
21st century, with their eyes wide open to sounds and sights, the
breathing of old age into new life will be reason enough for this film to be
valued for another hundred years. For between the Picta-phone and a bush baby
lies the terminus, the genetic code of the XML of the new millennium.